Joanna Braithwaite

Joanna Braithwaite was born in Halifax, England, in 1962, and immigrated to New Zealand with her family in 1965. She graduated from the Ilam School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University in 1985, and received a Master of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts Sydney, in 2000. She has lived and worked in Syndey since 1999.

Since the mid-1990s, Joanna has exhibited regularly throughout New Zealand and Australia. Major exhibitions include Wonderland (2005), a survey of her work that ran at Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū, and Significant Others (2011), curated by Gregory O’Brien and Jenny Bornholdt, which showed at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata, and Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery. In 2021, Joanna was Bowen Galleries’ principal exhibitor for Face to Face: Portrait Festival. Her exhibition Heads and Tales featured 50 small portraits reflecting intimate moments between people and animals. The subjects were drawn from personal and collected photos, sometimes from old magazines, and sometimes those of family and friends. Joanna has been the recipient of numerous awards, such as the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize in 2019. She has been a finalist numerous times in both the Sulman Prize and the Archibald Prize, and in 2006 she was a runner-up in the Portia Geach Memorial Award. Her work is held in many private and public collections across Australasia, including Artbank, Germanos Collection, and Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū.

Joanna’s practice is characterised by the great curiosity and respect she has for the animal kingdom. She is fascinated by both the connections between humans and animals, and the human responses and behaviours towards different species. Within her work, through the lens of the ambiguous and interdependent relationship between people and animals, Joanna examines current and local events, history, identity, and the contemporary structures of power and authority. Her work is figurative and realist by nature, but is rarely without a surreal or unexpected elements, inviting contemplation that brings viewers closer to an awareness of their own personal state.

• Truth be told, 2024
• Heads and Tales, 2021
• Stickybeak, 2017
• Old flames, 2012
• Walk my way, 2010

• Wrapped, 2023
• You won’t believe your eyes…a visual miscellany…, 2023
• About time, 2021
• Wrapped, 2020
• Wrapped, 2016
• Summer show, 2013-2014
• Works from stock, 2013
• Trigger: Wendy Bornholdt, Joanna Braithwaite, Noel McKenna, 2013
• Stuff up, 2011
• Wrapped, 2011